Austrian Authorities “‘Intensively Watching Islamist Websites”

Excerpt from report by Austrian newspaper Die Presse on 13 September

[Report by "no/red": "Recruiting Base in Internet"]

Vienna – The World Wide Web is increasingly used by terrorist groups to recruit members. “Therefore, we are intensively watching Islamist websites,” Gert Rene Polli, head of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and Antiterrorism, said recently at the presentation of the Constitutional Protection Report.

Constitutional protectors say that it is, above all, the propaganda of extremist organizations that is distributed via the Internet – on the one hand, via video messages, on the other via web logs and forums, part of which are accessible only to registered users and are, therefore, difficult to check.

As a result, Interior Minister Guenther Platter (“We must be able to keep pace with the criminals”) is currently preparing the ground for expanding the rights and possibility of investigators in Austria, above all by means of online searches of private computers. [passage omitted]

Originally published by Die Presse, Vienna, in German 13 Sep 07.

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